Brian Downs


Software Engineer, Open Source Advocate, Outdoor Enthusiast


The Hardest Basics

One afternoon last week my former colleague bl4ckcontact sent a link that blew my mind. So as a test of my own ability and also as a reference for others, I’ve put the following list of code samples together showing how to accommodate the requirements of the preceding link. Please feel free to send me examples of how to do this in any language I don’t have listed. After doing the first challenge and finding it not overly challenging, I got to thinking and figured I’d put together code examples for a number of tasks that might be asked of you during a coding interview.

I'm Writing a Book...

Not Happening… Feel free to read this post but as the first few words inidcate, this book isn’t happening. There’s been a number of books released recently that tackle the niche I was going to speak to. I think I’ll give some more thought to a topic but this will be put to bed for now. Smaller posts to this blog that are Go based will continue though. So I’ve decided to write a book.

Getting Reaquainted with AWS

I made a job change almost a year ago that took me away from the world of Amazon Web Services (AWS). It was a welcomed changed but not because of AWS. The team I was a member of labored over the decision of what cloud platform to put our telephont stack on for a number of months before settling on AWS. It was the best decision would made and still is to this day.

Helpful Go Tips and Tricks

This is a collection of helpful tips and tricks I’ve come across in my time learning Go. I’ll continue to update this list with new things as I find them. Please feel free to use any of the examples, correct any mistakes, and make suggestions for additions. Dedup an Array or Slice Remove duplicate entries in an array or slice. // []int{8, 6, 8, 2, 4, 4, 5, 9} func Dedup1(l []int) []int { index := map[int]struct{}{} new := []int{} for _, v := range l { if _, ok := index[v]; !ok { index[v] = struct{}{} new = append(new, v) } } return new // [8 6 2 4 5 9] } Reverse the Order of an Array or Slice Reverse the order of the elements in an array or a slice.

December 2014

December, 2014 was a very productive month. I got a lot done in regard to furthering my Go learning and contributing back to the Go community as well as development in general, a deeper understanding of cloud and data center networking, and exposure to a professional approach to asking inappropriate questions in a seeminly innocuous way. The latter I’ll leave for another entry as it’s interesting enough to stand on it’s own.

Go Phoenix-Chandler Meetup - December 2014

Go Phoenix-Chandler Meetup 2014-12-04 One month after the November meetup it was time for another meetup. After the great success of the first meetup in November, I was extremely excited for December’s meetup but this one was a bit different. …I was presenting. The evenings’s topic was getting started and up and running with Go as well as a look into Go’s tool set. I thought it was a great topic since there were a number of people at the previous month’s meeting who hadn’t even written a line of code and now they had the oppurtunity to get their enironments up and running as well as get a degree of familiarity with the tools.

Go Phoenix-Chandler Meetup - November 2014

Go Phoenix-Chandler Meetup 2014-11-06 Having never gone to a Meetup before, I was recently intriged in what the Valley had to offer for a community around a few of my interests. Over the past 4 months I’ve fallen head over heals in love with Go (golang) so naturally that’s the first Meetup I looked for. As luck would have it, the day I look a new group was forming and was planning their inaugural event.

Vim to an IDE and Back

Out of all of the available editors that came preinstalled on whatever distribution of Linux or version of FreeBSD I was working wtih at the time, I always found myself using vi(m). I’ve used pico, nano, ed, and emacs though none have had the grace and finesse of vi though. Editing config files was fine with the default settings though when I started writing shell scripts and further more, Perl scripts, I needed something more.

briandowns.github.io

I searched a bit for a decent system to build a static site and I really wanted to do it using Go. I hadn’t come across anything except a number of Python and Ruby static site generators (Jekyll and Hyde) that seemed to do the trick but didn’t really interest me. Then I found Hugo. So I found Hugo. Great. Now what. I’m not a UI guy, or a front-end guy, etc.

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